Chapter 38 Two Letters #4
“You don’t care enough about your own life to save it,” he growled at Auria, his heart thumping erratically, his breathing fraught, “but what about hers?”
At last, Auria nodded.
Saffron sat in the kingpin’s desk chair, staring at Segal’s severed head.
Questions cascaded through her mind.
Who was the boy in the blue cloak?
How had he gotten past the wards on the compound?
Why had he killed Sando Segal, and why was he bolshy enough to bring the evidence of it right into the dragon’s den?
For now, she had to move on. She likely had mere moments before Levan returned, and she still had no letter from the Steel King.
Of course, there was a very good chance Levan had recognized it for the damning evidence it was and destroyed it accordingly, but it didn’t seem like the kind of action he’d take.
He was obsessed with his parents’ legacy, and if that legacy involved scheming with the High North…
The correspondence was not in the desk or the ledgers, and a cursory check of the picture frames—they were always taught to search mattresses, floorboards, and frames in the Academy—yielded no results.
She had a fair understanding of how Levan’s mind worked, and such obvious hiding places would not call to him.
He was more oblique than that, operating at a slant, and yet there was still a predictability to that slant.
The password for the desk drawer in his own chambers was Baudry’s bitch, for Saints’ sakes.
Saffron rose to her feet and crossed to the alcoved bookshelves, lined with an array of leather-bound tomes. A cursory search of the titles garnered a potential lead in Nyr?th to Sarth: Tale of the Ages, but when she flipped through the worn, browning pages, there was no envelope tucked inside.
No other titles jumped out at her, and she was on the verge of giving up when she noticed a book less dusty than the others—as though it had been handled more recently. The Flora and Fauna of Flarence. Saffron’s pulse quickened. Flarence was a small town near the Nyr?th-Bellandry border.
There it was. The slant.
A parchment letter was tucked inside, neatly handwritten, several pages long, and signed by Vad Kr?nik. The Steel King himself.
Leaving the office exactly as she’d found it—with the notable exception of Segal’s severed head—Saffron slipped back to her chambers and began to read.
And a quarter of an hour later, she knew she had it at last.
Evidence of treason, damning enough to bring down the Bloodmoons forever.
Auria, Nissa, and Levan marched through the deserted corridors of the Order, Nissa still pinned back against the kingpin with a dagger to her throat.
They avoided the bullpen, where a smattering of night-shift workers finished up, and steered clear of the sleeping chambers where early birds would already be rising.
They came to a stop outside the office of Captain Vel Karvas.
Everything inside Auria was a yawning hole of despair. She had already lost so much, and now she would lose her calling. Not just her current job—any future shot at working in prosecution, at winning the Grand Arbitership.
How could one person lose so much and keep breathing?
Where could she possibly go from here?
Her entire life had had a purpose until now—because of this terrible mage. Was it not enough to take her grandfather, take the love of her life? Did he have to take her livelihood too?
All at once, she understood how hate and anger could coalesce into a force so strong it might drive a person to murder.
Not that she would ever act on it. But for the first time, she understood.
As her throat stung and bled, she ran through a series of alternate plays in her mind, tactical steps that could wrest this ghastly situation back into her favor without costing her the morals she lived her life by—because if she didn’t have her values, she really did have nothing.
She came up empty. She doubted that bartering with the information she had on the Whitewings, on the King’s Prophet’s involvement, would be enough to convince Levan Celadon to leave this building without Saffron’s letter.
But then—a stumbling block.
The password Nissa uttered at the lock of Karvas’s door did not cause it to open. The captain must have changed it recently. Nissa tried several more combinations of words from previous passcodes, but nothing worked.
Hope sprung up in Auria’s chest for the first time, until the vague invisible shape of the kingpin turned to her and said, “You’re a gifted enough Enchanter to successfully cast exuan, are you not?”
Auria’s heart sank into her stomach. Exuan was a charm used to strip an object—such as a lock or keyhole—of all its enchantments.
It was costly to cast, since a mage had to use more raw power than the sum of all prior enchantments combined, and the captain’s door would’ve been layered with so many old magical passwords that stripping them back would take everything she had.
Little wonder Levan was not willing to do it himself.
And the truth was that despite her many magical classifications, Auria was not, by nature, an especially powerful mage. She was smart, a quick study, precise, stringent, but the natural depths of her well were not so substantial. It might not be within her ability at all.
With a dark look that said if you try anything smart, I’ll slay your friend, the kingpin handed back Auria’s wand. Her beloved wand, with its smooth willow and sapphire studs, its elegantly carved spheres and gleaming ascenite handle.
For the briefest of moments, Auria considered one final attempt at disarming the kingpin, but merely repossessing his wand would not be enough.
He was too skilled in physical combat and could somehow wrest free from debilitan—the same was likely true of the statue curse.
Anything else would be too violent, too risky with Nissa pinned to his body.
Loathing herself with every breath, Auria gathered all the power she could. She crossed to the lock, rested the tip of her wand against it, and murmured, “Sen exuan.”
The magic rushed out of her in a destructive whoosh, and with it went all her worldly energy. She staggered to the side, more depleted than she’d ever been, and slumped to the ground as the door swung open.
Her well was bone dry, her glorious wand now useless, with no clear way to replenish. There was nary a velvine to be seen, and the rosemarroa and varouli perfume she’d applied before her shift had faded entirely.
She closed her eyes and resigned herself to her own impotence. “The letter is in the desk drawer, and the password is Ashen Narrows.”
Goodbye, life’s purpose.
Levan shoved Nissa forward into the office.
After several moments of hearing them shuffle and tap and incant, Auria peered around the corner in time to see Levan’s milky outline retrieve the parchment envelope.
She thought maybe his invisibility tincture was fading slightly, but was too exhausted to figure out how to use that to their advantage.
The migraine pulsed and pounded at her temples, her forehead, the marrow of her skull.
The knife wounds on her throat were hot, throbbing.
Nissa’s form relaxed infinitesimally, and behind her, the window opened to a rose-gold dawn. The empty air above the sill filled with an almost imperceptible presence; the kingpin planned to jump.
Then, terribly, and perhaps inevitably, the door to Malcus’s chamber, the room separating the captain’s office from the rest of the Order, banged open.
Vel Karvas stood on the threshold, straggly hair hanging to his clavicle, still dressed in his bed robes but with his silver cloak slung hastily over the top. A vein throbbed in his tattooed neck, and his glasses were askew over his pale blue eyes.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Not an authoritative bark, but rather a deathly cold murmur.
Auria scrambled to her feet, vision swooping so severely she almost lost consciousness. She grabbed at the doorframe for support. “There’s an intruder. The Bloodmoon kingpin came for the letter.”
But a quick glance over her shoulder revealed that the misty smudge over the windowsill had already leapt free.
Karvas took a step into the room, raising his wand—a short, black walnut—and hissed, “I warned you, Marriosan.”
Shaking rather violently, Auria gestured to the three narrow slits on her throat, the blood around the wounds already crusting and clotting. “Would I have done this to myself?”
Nissa appeared at her side. “It’s true, sir. Levan Celadon was here. He threatened us—both of us. Only when he had a blade to my throat did Marriosan relent. Before that, she was willing to die to keep the letter in our possession.”
Karvas barged past them into the office, so close that Auria could smell the stale morning breath, the must of recent sleep. He went to the desk drawer, found it hanging open, and slammed it shut so hard that it popped back out. Auria flinched.
“The kingpin leapt from the window mere moments ago,” Nissa said hurriedly. “We could still pursue him. We tried our best, sir, and we almost had him—I had the cuffs in my hand, but he wrenched free of debilitan, somehow, and—”
“Do you have any evidence of this wild conspiracy?” Karvas snapped.
“The common room,” Auria said desperately. “It’s ruined—Nissa used her fire to wound him.”
Karvas fixed his lupine gaze on her, cold and furious. “Any evidence of his presence.”
Nissa lifted her chin, the gold of her eyes shining bright. “Our word.”
Karvas surveyed the room—the open window, the desk drawer hanging out like a gaping mouth, the two bedraggled mages before him. “I do not abide traitors or turncloaks, and you’ve willingly turned over a valuable resource to a Bloodmoon.”
The Bloodmoons you yourself are weak to, Auria wanted to scream, but she had no fight left.
Karvas gave them a dark, almost glittering look.
“This will be the end of you both.”